Monday, September 17, 2012

We Ain't Got Nothing For You Here: Political Race and the Paradox of a Black President

Long live black politics! Black politics is dead! And what shall we do with the poor people?

When my friends and I planned Operation Ham Hock during our cultural nationalist conspiratorial minded phase in college, we were correct in that the election of a President who happens to be non-white would be the end of Black Politics and the triumph of color blind white racism. Our vision was not expansive enough. We failed to realize how a black president would cripple any efforts to discuss the realities of poverty, race, and class inequality in America. Damn our youthful ignorance.

Elijah Anderson, prescient and genius as he is, nails our blind spot and under-theorization in the New York Times piece "Is Poverty a Kind of Robbery?" where he observed:

Apparently, the Republicans have backed the Democrats, and President Obama in particular, into the proverbial racial corner. It is a supreme irony that Obama, the nation’s first African-American President, finds himself unable to advocate for truly disadvantaged blacks, or even to speak out forthrightly on racial issues. To do so is to risk alienating white conservative voters, who are more than ready to scream, “we told you so,” that Obama is for “the blacks.”

But it is not just the potential white voters, but the political pundits who quickly draw attention to such actions, slanting their stories to stir up racial resentment. Strikingly, blacks most often understand President Obama’s problems politically, and continue to vote for him, understanding the game full well, that Obama is doing the “best he can” in what is clearly a “deeply racist society.” It’s a conundrum.

Later in the same essay, Thomas Edsall connects the dots:

How different would the nation’s politics be if either party, or at
least the Democrats, added the concept of economic exploitation to its
repertoire?

Not only would doing so risk inflaming the issue of
race, but it would put at risk existing sources of campaign finance on
which both parties are dependent...This
dependence on moneyed interests effectively precludes exploitation as a
theme for either major party to develop. These sources of campaign cash
would dry up if they became the target of policies or positions they
found threatening.

Even as polarization poses more sharply defined
choices to the voter, pressing issues remain off limits. Poverty and
hunger have been dropped from the agenda. The range of policy and
electoral choices remains confined to what fits comfortably into a world
of muted ethical concern, a world in which moral relativism has
permeated society not so much from the bottom up, as from the top down.

Left activists and others quite correctly point out how common class concerns are obfuscated and deflected by white racism and White identity politics. The race-making con game is centuries old in America: it goes back to at least Bacon's Rebellion in the 17th century when white planters deemed black folks to be a class of permanent slaves and chattel, and white indentured servants were granted their "forty acres and a mule" upon the end of their "term of service."

In all, white skin carries privileges that are both material and psychic. Poor and working class whites know this very well--even as historians, sociologists, and others would like to pretend that poor whites have been "bamboozled" or "hoodwinked" into voting against their own self-interest--as opposed to making a choice to get in bed with Whiteness...and the perceived and real advantages that come with it.

Racial attitudes are closely tied to opinions about policy issues that are ostensibly "race neutral." This is especially true for conservatives where white racial animus over-determines their views on a number of issues ranging from national defense, to support for the social safety net, and personal privacy. Because black folks are cast as "anti-citizens," views about poverty are intrinsically tied to attitudes and stereotypes about people of color, where the white racial frame deems them as being non-productive, lazy, and a drain on white society.

The potential embodied by "political race," i.e. that shared class concerns can be used to overcome the divides of the color line in pursuit of the Common Good, is alluring. However, in a political moment that combines a black president, fiscal austerity, and rising white nativism, realpolitik may have killed the idea of political race as a viable strategy and made it the first/last resort of hopeful dreamers:

This skewing of the odds in favor of the rich comes at a time when the
Democratic Party is already inhibited by accusations that it likes to
foment “class warfare” and to play “the race card.” The result has been a
relentless shift of the political center from left to right. The two
most recent Democratic presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, have
pursued agendas well within this limited terrain. There is little reason
to believe that Obama, if he wins in November, will feel empowered to
push out much further into territory the Democrats have virtually
abandoned.

Are common class concerns the way forward? Or will diminishing resources, and a contracting State, mean that working class (and poor) whites will reup and double down on Whiteness in order to maintain their position in the class hierarchy against an imagined threat from black and brown folks?

8 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Vic78

It may have been wrong to pursue electoral politics as the only option for working toward common goals. I believe it should've been voting plus other avenues. I'm not really going to blame the GOP for everything that's going wrong. One has to look at the dems as well. They have over 90% of the black vote anywhere in the country. They could use that to get the party organized. They can also get some decent fundraising as well. If they had the damn sense to work with their base, they could get pretty far.

It's time for people to sharpen up. Talking about race with GOPers is a waste of time if you're in electoral politics. The black folks on the ground get it, what's going on upstairs? I remember people asking why doesn't the president speak about black issues. I thought it was obvious. The black caucus could have come to the president with some kind of plan when they had those majorities. They could've slipped some of them through during the health care fight. I guess they're satisfied being junior partners.

There's more that I can say about this sorry ass state of affairs, but I'll leave it at that.

This country was cursed from the very beginning when slavery was permitted as a lawful activity. England had already outlawed it within their borders in 1772 (although the practice was still permitted in the colonies). When the policy of "Manifest Destiny" was added to the new nation's agenda, I think we sowed the seeds of our own destruction. Sometimes I wonder if we shouldn't have gone ahead and allowed The South to secede. Sometimes I wonder if it would not have been better to stay as a colonial appendix of England, and worked toward a peaceable, just and egalitarian (as well as slave-free) separation.I know, I just committed Heresy, Apostasy and Anti-Patriotism. Still, there is so much that is psychically wrong in the People. Almost like an unhealable wound that absolutely will kill us; it's just a matter of when.Perhaps we are "just" in the middle of one of those extremely negative cycles. The Yijing says that when things have gotten to the furthest extreme, they turn and go back the other way. I kind of hope so; but then I ask myself what are we returning to, since our country seems to be founded upon slavery, inequality, expansionism and war?

"We failed to realize how a black president would cripple any efforts to discuss the realities of poverty, race, and class inequality in America."

Now here is something I don't blame Obama for. He didn't cripple such efforts, nor did his election cripple them. The black intelligentsia crippled it by building that wall of teflon around Obama. They crippled it with their wholly voluntary silence, with the notable exception of Smiley and West.

Are common class concerns the way forward? Or will diminishing resources, and a contracting State, mean that working class (and poor) whites will reup and double down on Whiteness in order to maintain their position in the class hierarchy against an imagined threat from black and brown folks?

We dream of political race. But Whiteness wins again, does it not?

"Whiteness", like "Blackness" is a lowest common denominator, purely emotional appeal.

I've been watching a perennial jiggabonic activity unfold in the city over the past couple of weeks. On the weekends, street corners at the intersection of black and white kansas city teem with teenagers and small children with buckets begging passersby for hand-outs to support this, that, or the other marching corp.

MARCHING CORPS?!?!?!?!

REALLY?!?!?!?!

I bite my tongue and pass on by, musing that there does not exist a math/science/robotics corp dispatching its youthful minions to the street corners to raise funds, and as is clearly evident, few things could be more useless and pathetic in the collapsarian, fin d'siecle 21st century than "marching".

I digress.

I don't believe that smart white folks want to reup on whiteness any more than respectable negroes want to wallow in ghetto fabulosity. In general, they have no more love for ignorant, violent, authoritarian scots-irish riff-raff than we do.

Common class concerns ARE the way forward.

However, these common class concerns need to be articulated not as status quo, kumbaya propositions, rather, they need to be addressed with progressive and advanced solutions which preserve quality of life while utilizing only a fraction of the energy and resources currently squandered on what is increasingly known and understood as an unsustainable modus operandi.

Knowledge, skill, ability, finesse and competence are the ONLY ways to truly win, and the yield from these core cultural values, the highest values our shared culture has to offer, must be put front and center to overcome the lowest common denominator killer-ape values being opportunistically mined and plied by scummy, status quo seeking politicians of every stripe.

@CNuYour not speaking to the average kid who (as I did) sold donuts and did drives to get afterschool programs funded. I played kids sports and was a member of FBLA/IFAS but I also had a family that got me to meetings and games. I had health insurance and dental through my mother. I was very lucky, but not many have those options. It's easy to see the end results but how do we get there?

PS those same kids you ignored are trying, you just misunderstand how. Don't be shocked when one of them steals from you later.

Tips and Support Are Always Welcome

Who is Chauncey DeVega?

I have been a guest on the BBC, National Public Radio, Ring of Fire Radio, Ed Schultz, Sirius XM's Make it Plain, Joshua Holland's Alternet Radio Hour, the Thom Hartmann radio show, the Burt Cohen show, and Our Common Ground.

I have also been interviewed on the RT Network and Free Speech TV.

I am a contributing writer for Salon and Alternet.

My writing has also been featured by Newsweek, The New York Daily News, Raw Story, The Huffington Post, and the Daily Kos.

My work has also been referenced by MSNBC, The Washington Post, USA Today, The Atlantic, The Christian Science Monitor, the Associated Press, Chicago Sun-Times, Raw Story, The Washington Spectator, Media Matters, The Gothamist, Fader, XOJane, The National Memo, The Root, Detroit Free Press, San Diego Free Press, the Global Post, The Lost Angeles Blade as well as online magazines and publications such as Slate, The Week, The New Republic, Buzzfeed, Counterpunch, Truth-Out, Pacific Standard, Common Dreams, The Daily Beast, The Washington Times, The Nation, RogerEbert.com, Ebony, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Fox News, Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Juan Williams, Herman Cain, Alex Jones, World Net Daily, Twitchy, the Free Republic, the National Review, NewsBusters, the Media Research Council, Project 21, and Weasel Zippers have made it known that they do not like me very much.